Debunking Archives - Page 7 of 26 - Tales of Times Forgotten

The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis Is Racist and Harmful

The so-called “ancient astronaut hypothesis” is a popular genre of pseudohistory which centers around the claim that extraterrestrial beings visited earth in pre-modern times, leaving behind supposed evidence of their presence. The supposed “evidence” for this “hypothesis” is based entirely on flagrant misinterpretations and misrepresentations, tendentious reasoning, false assumptions, forged artifacts, and often outright lies. As a result, the “hypothesis” is universally rejected among professional academic scholars, historians, and archaeologists.

I have written about the ancient astronaut hypothesis before. For instance, I wrote an article back in January 2020 about how we actually know that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids as tombs for their pharaohs, in which I debunked claims made on the show Ancient Aliens. I also posted an article a few days ago in which I debunk the popular ancient astronaut theorist claim that Alexander the Great saw flying saucers while on his campaigns. In this article, however, I am not going to try to debunk the ancient astronaut hypothesis. Instead, I want to explain the history of the ancient astronaut hypothesis, why it is not just a “harmless” conspiracy theory, and why it is actually harmful.

No, Alexander the Great Didn’t See Flying Saucers

If you’ve ever been on the internet or happened to turn on virtually any show that has aired on the History Channel within the past ten years, you’re probably aware that there are tons of people who are, shall we say, highly enthusiastic about so-called “unidentified flying objects” or “UFOs.” These UFO enthusiasts love to repeat a story which claims that the ancient Makedonian king Alexander the Great and his soldiers saw UFOs in the sky that looked like giant silvery shields at some point while he was on his campaigns.

The story that UFO enthusiasts keep repeating, however, is demonstrably entirely fictional. No version of the story ever appears in any ancient or medieval source. In fact, the earliest known mention of the story dates to the year 1959. Other people have debunked this story before, but I am going to debunk it again because UFO enthusiasts keep repeating it.

The Shocking Truth about Ancient Greek Makeup

There are tons of articles, blog posts, and YouTube videos online about ancient Greek makeup. Unfortunately, I have found that all of them are of utterly abysmal quality. None of the articles that I could find contained any citations to specific passages in ancient sources and all of them contained wildly egregious errors of fact and misconceptions seemingly derived from earlier online sources that, in turn, did not cite any ancient sources.

I have decided to remedy this situation by writing my own article about ancient Greek makeup. Everything I am about to say in this article will be concretely supported by specific passages from actual ancient Greek texts. If you’ve ever wanted to make yourself look like an ancient Greek beauty, or simply wondered what Greek women would look like in movies if they were portrayed historically accurately, then this is exactly the article for you!

Was Sappho Really a Lesbian?

One of the questions that I have frequently encountered online in discussions about ancient Greece is the question of whether the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was really a lesbian. On the surface level, the answer to this question seems like an obvious “yes.” After all, Sappho wrote poems in which she very expressly describes her erotic desire for other women, the word lesbian itself literally comes from the name of the island where she lived, and its synonym, the word sapphic, comes from her own name. There is even an entire subreddit about queer erasure called r/SapphoAndHerFriend, making fun of people who try to deny that Sappho was a lesbian.

I fully agree that there is no sense in which Sappho can be accurately described as “straight.” On the other hand, though, it would be an oversimplification to say that she was a lesbian in the contemporary sense. For one thing, the ancient Greeks generally did not think about sexuality in terms of which gender (or genders) a person was erotically attracted to, but rather in terms of whether they took the active or passive role during sex. There were no words in Ancient Greek in Sappho’s time that meant “gay,” “bi,” or “straight.” As such, it is highly unlikely that anyone in her time would have seen erotic attraction to women as a sign of any kind of innate identity.

Furthermore, the character “Sappho” who is the main speaker in Sappho’s poems is most likely a fictionalized literary persona, meaning that it is difficult to untangle the relationship between the speaker in the poems and the historical poet who composed them. Finally, given the fact that the vast majority of Sappho’s poems have not survived to the present day and ancient people told many stories about her having supposedly had affairs with men, it is possible that her character may have expressed erotic desire for men in poems or parts of poems that have not survived, which would make her what twenty-first-century westerners would consider bisexual.

Update: Dr. Christine Morris Confirms She Has Not Found the Trojan Horse

As frequent readers of my blog are already aware, on 10 August 2021, the website Greek Reporter republished an article that it originally published in 2014 claiming that archaeologists have found the remains of the Trojan horse. The story was quickly copied in both The Jerusalem Post and the International Business Times. The next day, however, I published a post on this blog titled “No, Archaeologists Have Not Found the Trojan Horse,” in which I pointed out evidence that the article published by Greek Reporter is a hoax written by someone with only very superficial knowledge of Aegean archaeology.

One of the pieces of evidence that I pointed out is the fact that the article cites a supposed professor at Boston University named Christine Morris as the leader of the team that has supposedly excavated the Trojan horse—but there is only one archaeologist who studies the Aegean Bronze Age named Christine Morris, she teaches at Trinity College Dublin, not Boston University, and, as far as I could tell, she has never excavated at Troy. Nonetheless, some people left comments on my post insisting that maybe Dr. Morris used to teach at Boston University at some point and maybe she really did discover the Trojan horse seven years ago.

I thought these objections were implausible, but, in the interest of being thorough, I emailed the real Dr. Morris using the email that is listed on her faculty webpage for Trinity College Dublin. She has very kindly taken the time out of her presumably very busy schedule to reply to my email. She has confirmed that she has never been affiliated with Boston University in any way, that she has never excavated at Troy or worked there in any capacity, that she has never claimed to have found the Trojan horse, and that the story that has been published by Greek Reporter and all these other news outlets is completely fabricated.

No, Archaeologists Have Not Found the Trojan Horse

On 10 August 2021, the website Greek Reporter published an article written by a contributor named Philip Chrysopoulos titled “Archaeologists Claim They’ve Discovered the Trojan Horse in Turkey.” The article claims that archaeologists have discovered the remains of a wooden structure inside the ancient city of Troy that they think is the actual Trojan horse. On the same day, The Jerusalem Post copied Greek Reporter’s story, publishing their own article titled “Did archaeologists find the Trojan horse?” that cites the Greek Reporter article as its only source.

The problem is that the whole story is a steaming pile of horse manure. The Greek Reporter article contains obvious signs that it is a deliberate hoax written in order to attract views in order to drive up ad revenues. By publishing this ridiculous, easily debunked story, Greek Reporter and The Jerusalem Post are both showing that, at the very best, they do not conduct even the most basic fact-checking or source verification and that they are not trustworthy news sites.

How Accurate Are “Photorealistic” Portraits of Roman Emperors?

In 2020, the digital artist Daniel Voshart used a neural net called Artbreeder to create a series of “photorealistic” portraits of fifty-four Roman emperors spanning from Augustus (ruled 27 BCE – 14 CE) to Carinus (who died in 285 CE). As the term “photorealistic” suggests, his portraits look almost like photographs. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not realize that these portraits are modern artistic impressions, not scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really historically looked like.

I’ve seen many people over the past year cite Voshart’s portraits and others like them as though they were authoritative, scientific recreations of what the Roman emperors really looked like. In particular, I’ve noticed a worrying number of white supremacists trying to cite these kinds of portraits as “evidence” that the ancient Romans were all white. In this article I would like to discuss why Voshart’s portraits—and others like them—should be taken with several grains of salt.

Was Jesus a Communist?

People have been claiming that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a communist or socialist for a very long time. Notably, Francis Bellamy (lived 1855 – 1931), who is best known today as the author of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, was a Baptist minister and self-proclaimed “Christian Socialist” who attracted a great deal of negative attention during his lifetime for frequently claiming that Jesus was a socialist. In more recent years, various pro-communist memes about Jesus being a communist have gone viral on the internet.

I’ve seen so many different expressions of the idea that Jesus was a communist over the years that I’ve decided to write an in-depth article examining whether this is an accurate characterization of Jesus’s teachings. There are indeed some genuine similarities between the views that are attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and communism. There are, however, a number of enormous differences between Jesus and contemporary revolutionary communists that make the claim that Jesus was a communist a profound mischaracterization of his teachings.

Dark Academia, the “Western Canon,” and the Decline of the Humanities

In around mid-July, I found out that there is apparently a huge internet “aesthetic” movement called “dark academia” that centers around a highly romanticized impression of what humanities scholars and students—especially those in the fields of classics, English, history, and philosophy—dressed and lived like in the twentieth century. Aspects of the aesthetic include wearing old-fashioned, dark-colored, stereotypically “academic” clothing and appreciating “classic” literature, art, and music.

For those who aren’t already aware, I am currently about to enter my senior year at Indiana University Bloomington double-majoring in history and classical studies (i.e., Ancient Greek and Latin), with honors in history. My current plan is to apply to graduate programs in ancient history later this year. Even though I don’t deliberately dress in a dark academia style and I don’t identify with the aesthetic in any particular way, being a humanities student does make me feel like I have a connection to it.

I was so struck by my surprise discovery of dark academia’s apparent popularity that I’ve spent a good part of the past two weeks researching it and its history. Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts, especially about how the current popularity of the aesthetic seems to be at least in part a reaction to the slow ongoing decline of the academic humanities.

Ancient Roman Masturbation

For the past four years, a photograph of a plaster cast of an ancient Roman man who died in the city of Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE has been circulating online with the claim that he died while masturbating, since his right hand happens to be positioned near his groin in a masturbation-like pose. Historically speaking, it is highly unlikely that this particular man really died while masturbating. The position of his hand is most likely a result of the muscle contractions resulting from the excruciating heat shock that killed him, rather than the result of anything he was doing before he was killed.

Nonetheless, there is a wealth of fascinating historical and archaeological evidence for both male and female masturbation in ancient Rome, including in the city of Pompeii. Needless to say, the following article contains discussion of evidence that is not suitable for children.